Everything to do with Lighting in Bryce 7.1
Rashad Carter
Posts: 1,803
At some point I will come up with a proper preamble for this thread, but until then I'll just say that this thread is a good place to share insights and ask questions regarding the lighting tools in Bryce 7.1.
There is an incredible wealth of information available about Bryce 7 on the web and in the store and we've all had some time with the new tools to experiment a bit here and there so we should all be able to contribute one thing or another at some point. This discussion is completely open.
Post links to tutorials and videos and threads that are relevant to the discussion at hand.
If you are asking a question it is a good idea to provide images of your situation. Help will be forthcoming.
If you are uploading mini tutorials please be willing to answer questions along the way.
I don't really have anything special to upload at the moment, I'm just getting the thread started so dispersed lighting discussions don't hijack other threads.
Bring on the questions and the observations!
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Comments
Of the new tutorials all these have something to say about lighting - admittedly some more so than others...
Bryce desert landscape - part 1 - a 15 minute tutorial in two parts by David Brinnen
Bryce desert landscape - part 2 - a 15 minute tutorial in two parts by David Brinnen
Bryce still life project - "capsules" - a 15 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
Bryce lake in a landscape - a 15 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
Bryce Abstract 360 HDRI Specular effect - a 15 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
Bryce lighthouse "light beam" effect - a 15 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
Bryce red hot metal effect - a 15 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
Bryce "Nuts and Bolts" - HDRI lighting project - red dragon in a white box - part 1 - a video tutorial by David Brinnen
Bryce "Nuts and Bolts" - HDRI lighting project - red dragon in a white box - part 2 - a video tutorial by David Brinnen
Bryce (TA) True Ambiance still life render of a red dragon - a 15 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
Image one from http://www.bryce-tutorials.info/bryce-tutorials.html
I've indicated which of my old video tutorials relate to lighting. And also how tricky I consider them to be.
Image two again from http://www.bryce-tutorials.info/bryce-tutorials.html
The two news ones relate to lighting and are fairly self explanatory.
Image three from http://www.bryce-tutorials.info/bryce-tutorials.html
All of Horo's tutorials (edit: except the first) relate to lighting.
Something then to open up the discussion?
Okay, so I am picking up a discussion started in the Show Us Your Bryce Renders thread regarding some lighting ideals. I explained to Mark aka LordHardDriven that the Atrium scenario is a good candidate for the 3D Fill Light. To play along, here is a link to the Atrium Model found here at Daz3d. For Platinum Club members it costs only $1.99.
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/trinity-atrium
Here are a few examples of renders of this space lit primarily with the 3D Fill combined with a bit of IBL for skylight. Default Sun provides the sunlight.
Example 1 is pretty large, the other examples are smaller but should help to give an idea of the way the 3D
Fill Lights are operating.
This tutorial will recreate the scene file I used so that you can get these same results at home. Once you have set up the scene we will import the model into Bryce 7.1 Pro via the Daz Studio Bridge. But first we must create the set up in Bryce. As Follows:
To recreate these light conditions you must do the following:
1. Create a New Bryce 7.1 Pro scene.
2. Delete the Ground Plane.
3. In the Sky Lab, load in your favorite daytime sky. If your chosen sky is not already based on an hdri then we must create an hdri based on your chosen sky.
A. Increase Shadow Intensity to maximum 100%
B. For now, make the Sun Invisible so that it wont pollute your HDRI.
4. In the IBL Lab, enable Use HDRI Image . Then enable Use Sky. Bryce will then convert the sky into an hdri. Also enable Cast Shadows. Then you should enable these exact settings.
A. Quality = 32
B. Saturation = 75
C. Intensity = 5
D. Specularity = 0
E. HDRI Effect = 75
F. Shadows = 75
Return to the Sky Lab
5. Converting the Sky to HDRI has automatically disabled the Default Sun, so you must re-enable it. Make sure the Default Sun is at least Diffuse Intensity 75. at an Altitude no less than 65. Ensure that the Sky Dome Color swatch at the bottom left of the Sun&Moon; screen is fully Black in color!!!
6. Again ensure that the Sun Shadow Intensity is at maximum 100%. Enable Soft shadows and limit the range to just 33.
7. Turn off all Haze, an interior like this one doesnt need Haze. Exit the Sky Lab.
8. By now you should be looking at a scene with no ground plane, but with a rather nice sky that is radiating HDR Light. So far so good
9. Now create a Cube 3D Fill Light. Duplicate this light and rotate the second one by 180 degrees along the Y axis. Now select both Fill Lights and edit them at once by applying these exact settings to the Attributes:
A. Position: X = 0 Y = 224.709 Z = 0
B. Scale: X= 722.93 Y= 435.825 Z= 722.93
Exit Attributes.
10. While both of the identical Fill Lights are still selected, Press the Letter "E" and enter the Light Lab. Apply these exact settings tot he Fill lights.
A. Select Gradient instead of Uniform Color. Select Edit to edit the Gradient.
B. You will observe that there is a slider with White on the left and Black on the Right. Switch the colors so that Black ends up on the left and White ends up on the right. Exit the Gradient Editor.
11. While still in the Light Lab apply these settings to your 3D Fills
A. Diffuse Intensity = 170
B. Quality = 64
C. Bias = -30
D. Randomness = 37
E. Distribution = 100
F. Enable Cast Shadows. Reduce Shadow Intensity to 75%
DO NOT ENABLE SOFT SHADOWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Exit the Light Lab.
12. Now your scene is set up. Now you will start DS from within Bryce by pressing the Daz icon.
13. Once in Daz Studio, locate and load the Atrium Model.
14. Once the Atrium Model has been loaded into Daz Studio, select Send to Bryce (located under "File.") Bryce will then send the Atrium over to Bryce 7.1
15. At this point you should find that the Atrium models is ready to render. Have fun and please do report back with your questions and observations.
Great work Rashad! OK... this is the "all about lighting thread" so here goes...
Bryce "Nuts and Bolts" - TA optimised radial lights - a 40 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
Sorry it is so long and rambling. Anyone other than Rashad, and a few select others (you know who you are), please take into consideration the *warning* supplied in the video's description.
Thanks, David! 3D Fills are quite useful and fast rendering.
Fantastic video on TA Optimized light sources. And thanks for the list of video links as well, I never got around to thanking you. Those are a valuable resource.
As obscure as it seems I believe lots of people will benefit from these experiments. There are clearly some inconsistencies with the way these lights operate but they are clearly on the right track. The benefits of Boost Light are becoming more apparent, as it seems to enable much of the color casting ability. I can think of many special effects that can be performed lit entirely with TA lights which is really fast. This is really useful information to anyone who really wants to speed up their TA renders. Retaining as much standard radial functionality as possible is important, and your video demonstrates how easy retention can be. Great job, even if it rambles here and there it still gets the point across and maintains interest.
Every aspect of the feature, even the bugs can have practical uses. In tine I am certain we will find ways to employ everything, even the bugs. The whole thing needs a ton of additional testing as well as some form of organization so that it makes logical sense. I must say the dragon is beautiful! I assume you took advantage of Boost Lights ability to produce noise and created a rather convincing looking rough sparkly type of material.
Thank you Rashad, yes the sparkles came from boost light. Here I've combined the rainbow texture (I did say it was useful Bryce 10 minute material project - rainbow texture - a tutorial by David Brinnen) with the use gel feature for TA optimised light driven by global ambient in the light gel material and exclusion to remove colour "burnout" due to capping. The render took 5 minutes to complete and it lit by two TA optimised light source with TA scattering correction and boost light used. OK it may not look like much, but as a proof of concept this shows that it should be possible to create an effect somewhere between that of HDRI's coloured light component and TA's indirectness that renders very efficiently.
Okay well first of all Rashad let me say thanks for you going to all the time, effort and expense to help me improve a render. As you can see by the attached image I was successful although it didn't turn out exactly like yours so I'm thinking you took some extra steps not described in your tutorial?
The only criticism I have is the way you did things, by creating a new starting scene, is that doing so wipes out all the pre-set camera views for the scene. This isn't a major problem though just a minor nuisance. In theory though shouldn't I be able to take the starting scene and modify it according to your tutorial to get the same results and preserve the camera angles? I think the only problem would be that to use that scene you're supposed to alter the size of the Atrium after you import. In your version you're just importing the scene and leaving it as is after import. By the looks of it you made the fill light cubes roughly the same size as the Atrium. So to use the scene in the BCF I'm guessing I'd have to import and set the atrium size first and then follow you're tutrial with the exception of sizing the cubes to whatever the Atrium size is.
I'm guessing you have a machine closer to what David has then what I have because I started the render posted here just before I went to bed at 3am, it said it would take a bit under 2 hours to render. When I woke up at 10am it was only about 80% done with Anti Aliasing. To me nearly 8 hours is not exactly fast rendering.
Mark - if you use the normal render, estimation is only for the render, not the AA-ing. Particularly if you use IB light, the AA pass can be as much as 10 times as long. If you go premium, start at a low rpp value and plop render a small part, then increase the rpp value one notch and test again. You often get away with 9 or 16. When you start the render, the estimated time to render is calculated for the complete render and it is not too far off. Often, the render finishes even a bit earlier.
Mark,
Your test looks good. I'd say the indirect lighting is a success. But it is possible that somehow your default sun got disabled, I'd suggest checking on that.
In the way of render time, I'd say you should avoid Premium, go with standard AA as Horo explained. Often we have to make a conscious decision between lighting quality and render pixel quality. For my money I would rather wait all night for a well lit scene than a poorly lit one with perfect lines and curves.
You can speed this render substantially by lowering the quality of the IBL from 32 to just 16. Also you have twin 3D Fill lights each quality 64 that can be lowered to around 20. These steps alone should drop your render from 10 hours to about 3 at most.
3D Fills are fast compared to TA, is what I meant to imply. Before you said it takes around 2 days to render with TA so I figured that 10 hours was a vast improvement. Plus, I really like how well the 3D Fill distributes the light around the space.
Yes, I am on an 8 core Xeon system, not so different than Davids in total speed. Yes those of us with powerful systems can push the render settings higher and higher.
So far so good, Keep at it!!!!!!!
I love this rainbow texture David!!
Yeah it was the sunlight being disabled, when you render the sky for the HDRI it automatically disables the sunlight and since the tutorial didn't say to re-enable it I figured you intended for it to be off. I checked and it was off so I turned it on and that created the brighter areas in the scene that was lacking compared to your render.
By the way that time was based on normal rendering and not premium. I don't mind the time if the end result is a nice render but it is frustrating when one is trying to see how adjustments have impacted the scene.
Mark,
Good point about the Hdri conversion disabling the sun. In step 5 I should have stated that it must be re-enabled. I will edit the tutorial to include that. Thanks.
To speed up rendering dramatically, you should exclude the hair from all of your various cluster light forms. That means excluding the hair from the hdri and from the twin 3D Fills. The Light Lab cannot see inside of a group, at least not directly. But it can see inside of them indirectly. You can use a decoy object. Most likely there are multiple layers to the hair model. What you should do is select each of the hair models individually and name them all HAIR in the Attributes. Now you will create a standard sphere. You will rename this sphere as HAIR. Because the sphere is not trapped inside of a group, the Light Lab and IBL Lab can now list HAIR as an item that can be excluded. If you select HAIR for exclusion, it will exclude every single mesh within the scene that shares the exact same name. What I am suggesting for indirect lighting on the hair might be some standard material ambience. So long as it is minimal it will not ruin the hair. The render speed increase however will be startling. Most hair materials use blend transparency that is extremely sensitive to radial lights. IBL and 3D Fills are made of multiple point lights leading to longer than desired render times.
You can also disable soft shadows for faster rendering now that you've got the sun turned back on.
On the other question, yes, I think you should easily manage to scale the 3d fill to fit the size you desire for the atrium. The fill should be more or less the same size as the Atrium. You might find you need to alter the brightness of the Fills, they can tend to appear brighter when they are smaller. But for my tastes I have learned to work at the Daz Studio Bridge import scale because scaling is a very important element to me and I don't want to chance it in most cases.
When you are ready I will explain the reason why two fills are beneficial over a single one and why they need to be 180 degrees different rotation from one another. I will also explain the gradient thing a bit more.
David, I'm wanting to finally attempt this tutorial. I would like to use the dragon so I can compare my results to yours. I did manage to get the dragon both in the .ply format that I then converted to obj using a free program called MeshLab and another version someone else had already converted to .obj from the .ply. When I tried to import either, directly into Bryce I get an error that reads: An unexpected error has occured (failed creation). I can import them into Studio but when I try to take either across the bridge Bryce just seems to hang with no progress showing in the import progress window. I also tried exporting them from Studio as an obj and then take them into Bryce that way but get the same failed creation error. So now I'm curious, how in the heck did you get that thing into Bryce? Could you please either give me the steps to do it or a copy of the version you have?
Nah that's okay the scene is pretty much done and no real need to make it render faster but that's an interesting trick for the exculsion process. I'm wondering though how do you do exclusion for the HDRI? I know how to do it in the light lab for other lights, does that do it there for the HDRI as well?
As for explaining the why's on using two 3D Fill cubes and the gradient change feel free to do that whenever you want. Once it's here, even if I'm not ready, it'll be here for a while....well unless Daz does another forum upgrade in the near future. :)
IBL influence controls here...
Ah yes, that's right, I should have remembered that. Thanks.
Bryce "Nuts and Bolts" - TA optimised radial lights advanced - a 15 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
Well since I'm still waiting for an answer on how to get the Stanford Dragon into Bryce to do the Dragon in a box tutorial I had to put that one on hold. In the meantime I tackled the Desert landscape tutorial and here is my result. I'm pleased with it although I couldn't get it to do exactly what I wanted it to do.
On a side note I had a devil of a time on that part where you make the sand in the material more uniform. You said (and in the text box too) to cntrl + left click to get to the right controls. Well I don't know if that was a mistake or some systems are different, but after trying ctrl + left click for 20 minutes and failing to get the appropriate reaction from Bryce, I finally succeeded by using alt instead of ctrl. So either it's actually alt left click or it varies based on the configuration a person is using computer wise
Maybe the email bounced, but I posted you yesterday about the Stanford Dragon.
And yes you are right about the colour controls, I will update the video, thanks. At least it tells me it is worth putting things like that in - not mistakes I mean things like accessing the colour menus.
Edit. OK I've rerendered the video - with the correction, but youtube will not let me update the video. So I've added the amendment to the text. And I've passed an updated video over to Horo for inclusion in the DVD2 compilation.
Also, I meant to say how well your following the tutorial came out. And if nothing else sticks in your memory, at least now you will know how to access the colour menus?
Maybe the email bounced, but I posted you yesterday about the Stanford Dragon.
And yes you are right about the colour controls, I will update the video, thanks. At least it tells me it is worth putting things like that in - not mistakes I mean things like accessing the colour menus.
Ah the email may have gotten thru I have a bad habit of not checking my email unless I am expecting something. Comes from growing up in the snail mail era I think. :)
I just checked and yep, it was there, thanks.
Another TA boost light test using TA optimised radial light sources with gels.
More about lighting Bryce 25 minute lighting project - upgrading advanced lighting - a tutorial by David Brinnen
Maybe the email bounced, but I posted you yesterday about the Stanford Dragon.
And yes you are right about the colour controls, I will update the video, thanks. At least it tells me it is worth putting things like that in - not mistakes I mean things like accessing the colour menus.
Edit. OK I've rerendered the video - with the correction, but youtube will not let me update the video. So I've added the amendment to the text. And I've passed an updated video over to Horo for inclusion in the DVD2 compilation.
Also, I meant to say how well your following the tutorial came out. And if nothing else sticks in your memory, at least now you will know how to access the colour menus?
Well thanks, I did have to go back and replay certain parts a few times to see how you got things the way you did but your tutorials are quite good and fairly easy to follow if there are no things needing correction. :) I'm learning alot though and if I keep at it one day I might even pass for a Bryce artist. :)
David,
I haven't had time to watch any of the new videos over the last couple of days but I must say I am very pleased with the results you are achieving. I am indeed pleased as well to see you discovering the merits of Boost Light especially in relation to HDRI, why I've been so certain about its benefits despite the noise. Looks like you've made good sense of outsmarting the noise. The contrast levels in these images are perfect. I'm really happy with these results. Please do keep them coming!
Mark,
I think the landscape looks very nice. That sky is outstanding as is the overall mood.
Thanks but all that is really attributable to David, the Sky for example, per the tutorial, is copied directly from one of the scenes in David's Bryce Pro Cloud Scapes. The mood is really all David too since every aspect of the scene is spelled out by his tutorial.
I do listen sometimes... but in this case Boost Light is being used with ambient driven TA optimised gels - in a rather dubious way I seem to have inadvertently discovered/invented. There is too much contrast in most HDRI to let it function with Boost light. When you see the last batch that focus on this feature, I think you will be surprised to see how it works. And it works better than it seems to have any right to work.
Things to do to modify contrast, boost light, don't boost light, gamma correction on/off. If you have too much colour (and now that is possible) turn off boost light and turn on gamma correction. I know it sounds balmy... but these global ambient driven TA gel lights work in curious ways.
Digging deeper - here are some half unexpected findings Bryce "Nuts and Bolts" - TA RGB response - a 15 minute tutorial by David Brinnen
The dragons look fantastic. However there seems to be a bit of a logical error. Why is it that I can see six different colored dragons but in the reflections from the floor there are only three colors each seen twice? At first I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me but alas I think its definitely part of the image. It's probably explained just fine in the video, when I get around to watching it I will let you know.
On TA Optimized Light sources, it should be stated that the idea behind these lights lends itself to the direction I think you are heading in. PJF originally came up with the idea with his glowing objects tutorial from Bryce6 regarding TA. It operated by using Ambience to create bright spheres TA could use to bounce around. When we developed the new TA that was diffuse driven, the ambient channel became what it should have been, it became the diffuse multiplier of sorts which should make ambient driven TA optimized light sources quite versatile. I literally have to thank PJF for the idea which I then took to another level and implemented it as a full feature.
The results you are getting are compelling to say the least. I think you may have stumbled upon a new and better way to get more accuracy out of TA. Brilliant work good sir. I look forward to your further discoveries/inventions.
In some ways these are exciting times because enough time has passed that people are beginning to look at the new features and seeing what they can really do. I'm excited.
Thanks Rashad, yes the inconsistency you correctly observed is central to the topic of RGB response.
Here's another Bryce 20 scene lighting project - Using IBL with boost light and TA gels - by David Brinnen
Here this issue with noise, disproportionate RGB response, IBL incompatibility and boost light, is overcome - by quite a devious strategy.
I love the richness of the colors.